NIST National Vulnerability Database down due to malware

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U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database is unavailable, and has been since they discovered malware on some of its servers last Friday.

“The National Vulnerability Database public-facing Web site and several other NIST-hosted Web sites are currently unavailable due to discovery of malware on two NIST Web servers,” Gail Porter, Director of Public Affairs at NIST, replied to a inquiry by Kim Halavakoski.

“On Friday March 8, a NIST firewall detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet. NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline. Malware was discovered on two NIST Web servers and was then traced to a software vulnerability. “Currently there is no evidence that NVD or any other NIST public pages contained or were used to deliver malware to users of these NIST Web sites.”

She also noted that they are continuing to respond to the incident and will restore these public-facing servers as quickly as possible, but couldn’t give a definitive date.

“Hacking the NVD and planting malware on the very place where we get our vulnerability information, that is just pure evil!” commented Halavakoski.